Back to the Battlefield: Hands-on With Call of Duty Wii

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We tweak controls and heat up the flamethrower for a new level of World at War.

By Mark Bozon

It seems like just yesterday that we took to the battlefield in Activision's next Call of Duty effort on Wii, and that's due mainly to the fact that it was. True, we just got done covering Call of Duty: World at War, Treyarch's Wii shooter that takes the COD4 engine, and uses it to bring the core experience to Nintendo's console with as much "next gen" core as it can, but there's more to see here at Ninteodo's conference, and we're here to play it.

We won't go into the general recap of everything since, well, you can check it out right here, but we do want to give you a look at what else is new, and it includes both control changes we made this time around, and also a new level.

For starters, we'll focus on control. In our hands-on yesterday we mentioned that we got the options as close to perfect as we could, but needed more time to tweak them. We have, and while it's better, we're still convinced a few quick changes could make this one even better. This time around we again cranked the bounding box to as tight as possible, but now took off the camera re-adjust, used the "insane" camera speed in all areas, and took that scheme onto the field.

In general these controls work even better than they did in the previous hands-on we did, with the general quickness of the game upped significantly. For veterans of Wii FPS games, you'll already know the feeling of quickly flicking left, right, up, or down to shove the screen in small bursts, so while it is far from having the aged, Red Steel-like controls, you'll still need to use a few flicks every now and then to really get the camera moving. The bounding box option works, but the intensity could be upped, meaning that the cursor still has a small area where it won't affect the camera in the center, and even when it does, it still starts out with a slower camera pan than we'd like. To really get it moving (which, again, works better than when we played it previously), you'll still need to go about 30% away from the screen's center. Upping not only when the cursor moves, but how quickly it gets to 100% screen pan speed would really help the control. From what we can see with the current build, there's still a bit of tweak time and bug fixing to be done, so hopefully Treyarch's Wii team can get the memo and just tighten it up a bit more.

In fact, should the control go from good to great, there's an awesome core experience waiting, as shown in the latest level, "Blowtourch and Corkscrew." In this mission, you take the role of a private in the US army, as a team storms Okinawa bunkers in tall grass and open fields. Here you'll need to make use of your four smoke grenades by rotating the Wii-mote left (a twist motion, like opening a door) and then tapping the "+" button to throw where your cursor is pointed. Smoke fills the entire area in a gray haze of cover (which looks great on Wii, by the way), and allows you to move up the battlefield bit by bit. The battle brought us back to Call of Duty 2, during the opening Russian mission, where you and your team storm across a gigantic field to topple a huge compound that was now Nazi-infested. Just like that mission, cover was a necessity, as the enemies would were constantly attacking from mounted machine guns in classic D-Day fashion, running kamikaze at the front lines, using on-field cover, and jumping out of small underground hatches in full ghillie suits. These enemy types made an appearance in the last hands-on we did as well, but this time around it was the mix of rushing enemies, mounted guns, smoke, and ambushing enemies that really gave the experience a chaotic feeling. War may be hell in real life, but it's damn fun in front of a 50" plasma.

That mission extended on through a small cave area (showing off some pretty impressive geometry), and out into another open section where we had to politely duck out. Before going though, we had a chance to try out a bunker-clearing tactic similar to our first hands-on: we rushed through the area (filled with flammable high grass) and torched everything, filling the bunkers with waves of fire, and finally chucked a satchel charge in to blow the thing apart from the inside. Good stuff.

The new control setup we tried made the experience a bit stronger this time around, but it could still use some more tightening up. The game plays great, the weapons have a nice level of recoil, and torching the entire area makes for good fun. If the control can be locked down, COD will be a killer FPS on Wii. It's already a visually impressive offering, and one that -- while still not quite there in controls -- is a great third party option for Wii's holiday season. Oh, and we're waiting to get hands-on time with the multiplayer, as that could be a huge addition to the Wii's otherwise minimal list of online titles.